by Pico Iyer
The Oloffson was a refuge, of course: its friendly owner had been to prep school in America and the Ivy League; he hardly seemed perturbed when people got possessed at his band’s concerts, and started rolling their eyes. Sometimes mobs came into the hotel grounds with flaming torches, wanting to burn the place down; he resisted them almost single-handedly. He did not recommend we go out of the hotel, though, even as far as the Sexy Photocopie shop, or the nearest bar; the bush began outside the hotel gates. It was not Cartesian.
I had a four-room suite (the Lillian Hellman suite, in fact), with a terrace overlooking the garden. There was CNN on the TV, and on the tables were glossy magazines from New York. The magazines, in which I might easily have found an article of mine, spoke of the prosperity and promise of the new Information Age; they spoke of a digital world and man’s capacity to get the better of everything around him. The ads were full of jewels and expensive clothes, apt for the pop stars and film directors who stayed here. The people lined up near the Rue des Miracles, outside the Wonderful Semi-Lycée, were relieving themselves in mountains of trash.
It was, I think, the same dialogue the Puritans had known when they arrived in America (and the protagonists of their dramas were two: God and the Wilderness). It was, though the terms would have been different, the dialogue the British entered into when they went to Africa and India. It was a dialogue that takes place inside every being—“redskin” and “pale-face,” as the literary critics used to say, the genteel tradition and the barbaric yawp—but it was one that it was convenient to describe in terms of Descartes, the round hole and the square peg. The British Empire—or any empire, including the French one here—stands accused of importing straight lines and right angles to a land of curves, of making the forces of Eternity obey a railway timetable. As if one could lay down a perfect grid on a teeming polymorphous swarm (in India, say, in Haiti), which has outlasted all systems and ideologies (and, in India, sometime in its adolescence, had given us, some say, the very symbol we use for zero). It is a dialogue between sense—the forces of progress and order, and understanding—and everything that stands far beyond our apprehension: mystery.
“ ‘I do so hate mysteries,’ ” says Adela, the young English visitor who has recently arrived in India and been invited to dine with Dr. Aziz, a little before her soul-emptying trip to the Marabar Caves, in A Passage to India.
“ ‘We English do,’ ” says her older, wiser friend, Mrs. Moore.
“ ‘I dislike them not because I’m English but from my own personal point of view,’ ” she goes on, as a good Forsterian character might.
“ ‘I like mysteries,’ ” pronounces Mrs. Moore, “ ‘but I rather dislike muddles.’ ”
A little earlier, the English visitors have trembled to the happier side of the ineffable, as the Brahmin Dr. Godbole suddenly breaks into a haunting, inexplicable Hindu song; it is, perhaps, a large part of what they can cherish in India—the imminence of the unknown. The Marabar Caves round out the equation, though, with the other side of the unsayable, and the comfortable sightseer in the poorer, wilder areas of the globe finds she’s in deeper than she knows, in all senses. She can try to rise to the questions mystery raises (as in Melville), but more often she will get swallowed up in them (like the characters in Bowles).
The quester (Adela’s last name is Quested) goes out in search of something outside the range of her experience, far from the imprisoning comfort of her life; and she ends up, very often, with some disease, inward or external, from which she will never recover. In the novel in which Adela finds herself, the section called “Caves” is sandwiched between one called “Mosque” and another called “Temple.” It is as if some grain of the unknowable, some piece of what is beyond us, gets inside the soul the way a pebble may get inside one’s shoe, and after that there is no way of finding the calm one knew before.
The pebble we call mystery, horror, the shadow-world; we call the primitive or the jungle, whatever lies at the very back of us, deep down, in the caves reserved for spirits not of the flesh. The part that comes before cognition, and goes on long after cognition has taken its place on the Cartesian terrace.
My parents (in British India) grew up, I think, in the middle of this dialogue, taught with one part of their beings, the daylight side, to sing of a “green hill far away” and to memorize the verses of Tennyson and Shelley, while with the other they were mumbling ancient prayers, and tying pieces of string around their limbs. Never eating meat or touching a piece of food that anyone else had touched, even if that someone was the one who was teaching them about Locke and Plato and Spinoza.
What was alien to them, in fact, and ravenous, was a world without shadow, where everything was smiling and people had no “side,” as the English might have said; the California they came to where there were no Marabar Caves, as such, and yet people wore their lives, their souls, their tremulous destinies upon their sleeves, to be smudged and abraded by everything that passes. To someone who comes from a society of rites, of purdah, it is explicitness, and the elimination of all veils, that can feel unsettling.
This is an obvious point, but it becomes urgent in a world where so many people live in the middle of the Other; each of us is unprotected in different ways, and alienness inheres not in a place or object, but in our relation to it. Our fears—of course— are as private, as unrational as our dreams. For the American Indians, the Puritans were the wilderness, with their figure bleeding on the cross, their hanging of witches from the gallows, their morbid attentiveness to the dark forces all around; for my parents, California was the place where suddenly Plato meant nothing, and Wordsworth didn’t scan—all that Britain and India had given them could get no purchase in a world without a sense of history, or center, or direction.
And so they were colonized, in a way, by randomness, the vacuum of a place without society or community, where the old lessons had no meaning; while I, who grew up in the midst of it, had to travel far in search of a more ancestral kind of anarchy and the wild. Which is why, with an old British friend, and a lifelong Christian, I was bouncing now through the wastes of Haiti, gravestones beside the Route National 1, and shadows stealing through the overgrowth of our hotel to take drinks at the cocktail hour under a folk-art depiction of the Last Supper.
“It’s why I read the Bible,” my friend said, as we lurched along pockmarked roads till we came to a very old building haunted by pictures of its vanished French occupants, topless in the sun. “Because I fail. Because I’m never the person I would like to be.” The town in which we arrived was famous for its murders, and the people were now praying for the next U.S. invasion.
On New Year’s Day we went to a small church near the Oloffson, and at the Catholic mass young women in their Sunday best played voodoo drums instead of an organ, and parishioners stood among great pillars on which had been written single words in French: PIETY . . . FORCE . . . FEAR. Something that had existed long before Christ’s arrival, and far outside his domain, had come into this building that was itself, I thought, a hopeful, perhaps naive attempt to draw lines around the dark and make a kind of order.
Back in the hotel, on the sunlit terrace, the owner was talking about how he had bought the place for twenty dollars, his partner having left because there were all these people killed in the street. A woman from New York, head of her own P.R. agency, was talking about the time she’d gone out with Warren Beatty, the time she’d met Bob Dylan at Al Kooper’s house; when her husband called with a question, she took the call in the hotel manager’s office, and her voice rose and cracked as she began tapping her fingers on the desk. The owner’s Haitian mother-in-law lay flat out on a bench beside the reception desk as if she were now stuffed.
“Cartesian” was a word I’d never heard in casual conversation before, the Frenchman sipping at his wine, the rats scurrying outside; as we got up in the dark and took the taxi back to the hotel, it didn’t really translate to the dark men outside the College René Descartes and the ho
spital with its sign in two languages, ARMS PROHIBITED INSIDE. At the Oloffson, as the hotel manager and his band played (in the lobby, silent Chaplin films were projected over the painting of the Last Supper), excited fans pulled out their Uzis, and security men sat guard over the fifty or so weapons they’d confiscated that evening. The lines in the maps in my guidebook were all straight and clear; the opening hours were listed for every café.
“I am not seeking an escape from dread,” wrote Czeslaw Milosz, after fleeing the shadows of his native Poland for the open spaces of California, “but rather, proof that dread and reverence can exist within us simultaneously.” On the streets, the signs said simply, unanswerably, TOMORROW BELONGS TO HAITI.
Pico Iyer
SUN AFTER DARK
Pico Iyer is the author of several books about cultures converging, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, and, most recently, Abandon. His articles appear often in such magazines as Harper’s, Time, and the New York Review of Books. He lives in suburban Japan.
ALSO BY PICO IYER
Abandon
The Global Soul
Tropical Classical
Cuba and the Night
Falling Off the Map
The Lady and the Monk
Video Night in Kathmandu
FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, APRIL 2005
Copyright © 2004 by Pico Iyer
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Departures and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this work originally appeared, often in very different form, in the following: The American Scholar, Buzz, Condé Nast Traveler, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and Time.
Excerpts from When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro reprinted courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Iyer, Pico.
Sun after dark: Flights into the foreign / Pico
Iyer—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Iyer, Pico—Travel. 2. Voyages and travels. I. Title.
G456.195 2004
910.4—dc21 2003054612
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eISBN: 978-0-307-42801-1
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